Processing Your Order (How I Created my Vision Board)

Leah's vision board going to print

I heard about vision boards from a few friends. One gal friend was telling me about her experience putting one together with her sisters and cousins, who (I'm sure) were also as equally talented, driven, beautiful as she is. And not only do they meet and encourage/challenge each other regularly on their vision boards, they do this kind of thing every year. What a gift to have a cadre like that. (I'd almost kill for one.) And while I crave deep conversations and partnership, I've always struggled with spending a little too much time inside my own head, and find it hard to find folks to do this kind of thing with. #introvertchallenges

Well, normally I resist things that feel gimmicky, but I also realize that when I say that, I'm trying to shut things out that sound non-native to me. And. Well. But isn't that contrary to the point? When you need fresh perspective, you need to do things differently. Right? I need to be open, and stop being dumb about this. Ok. So here's my little project I did this morning. I'm ridiculously proud of myself for doing this. 

• I started with a bit of googling and youtubing, because sadly I've never done a vision board before. That was helpful to get started. The guidelines were simple and thoughtful. Just my style.
• I decided that since I didn’t have time to gather a bunch of magazines and print and cut out images and break out my glitter glue, I’d use Canva. I love Canva. I use it a lot for work and decided it would work great for me today. And it turned out to be perfect for me!
• The how is kind of fun. Canva has layouts with grids. You can upload images, and then “click” the images into the grids, reposition, crop, and apply filters if you want, and boom. It’s GTG. (Being a marketer helps here, as I do stuff like this – image selection, messaging, calls to action – all the time.)
• I searched for images online, free good ones. And I superimposed some words on top of them, like captions. Batta boom, batta bing, presto chango = vision board.
• My vision board is all about things I want. Things I want to be, to have, to do. I recently wrote out a bucket list, so some of those went onto the board. Some images and words were things I wanted in the near future, and some were longer term goals, and others were perpetual wishes for myself. I spent some time switching some pictures out for bolder images and words. That was an interesting process to notice that a particular wish or goal wasn’t bold or honest enough. It felt really good to dig deeper and deeper, and I replaced several images and captions a few times. I had to redo my layout a couple of times because of this, but that was a part of the process for me.
• I had one final issue – I need some physical version of my vision board to look at home or at work or whatever. (Vision boards supposedly work best if you look at them regularly, to inspire and challenge and focus you.) So this was one of the coolest parts: Canva has a print function where you can create flyers and posters with a few clicks. For a couple hours of work online, and for less than $10, I will have a few copies of professionally printed vision board coming my way in a few days.

How cool is that?

I’m not sure if I would have gotten through this process without these tools available to me. I’m a professional and a mom and a wife and all that other stuff, too. My evenings are crunched, my mornings harried, and most weekends spent chasing some elusive sense of rest and well-being. Finding the time to get a bunch of old print magazines and art supplies together is NOT my idea of a good time or one that even feels practical. I’m going to say God bless image searches and free online graphics tools and my professional skill set that made doing all this super easy.

And it’s funny. This image in this blog is showing the final step, which is submitting my flyer-sized vision board to print. And it’s also rather indicative of what a vision board is all about at its core – you’re supposed put an order into Life, essentially, about what you want. You tell LIFE what YOU want. And you’re to focus on realizing that order for yourself. Being present and reflective in the process, is important too. Processing your order, indeed! 

Burnout, Shmurnout

So, alas.  I am yet again entirely average. I have hit some kind of mid-career burnout, and am working on addressing it.  Which is more work, and too much work was the cause of this to begin with. Talk about conundrum!

Swamps of Sadness, from that glorious
childhood movie Never Ending Story

This isn't the excruciating moments of parenting with small children where one wonders how to get from one second to the next, or the piercing reality that "I chose this" of some hard job or something.  This is the relentless march of putting other things ahead of the truly most important things like self and family for far too long that one has pretty much lost one's way.  Bedraggled of hair and imagination, one is wearing torn, gray clothes in a torn, gray land, wondering what happened.  But scarily not caring overly much how and when it did happen so wrong.

It's REAL. And thank God some of my friends know what this is and have been there or are still there and regard this state of mind and heart with the death-like seriousness it deserves.  I am burned out utterly. 

Some say...

...that burnout is common for people in mid career.

...that it affects those in the "giving" professions, like medical professional, ministers, etc. more than others.  I don't quite qualify here, but whatev.

...that recovery is entirely possible - and I believe it. 

...that recovery takes time - and I believe it.

And I simply want to say, in the midst of this working on life with calloused fingertips with no fingernails and raw, bleeding tips - that I'm ok or will be.  But I also am confused. 

When did we get here?

-Lear

Stuff I Did in 2017, including Accepting my Balding Head and Becoming a Soccer Mom

I'm a big fan of reflection. I feel like it's better than resolutions. Way better. And it's nearly Setsubun, an obscure and hardly explainable holiday in Japan where you throw toasted soybeans out your window or sliding glass door and scream at demons.  (no joke)  "Oni wa sotto, fuku wa uchi."  Demons away, fortune come hither.  Or something like that.  My distant countrymen sure know how to celebrate the coming of spring.

Here are a handful of things I did in my 39th year that seemed momentous or odd or horrifying. Take your pick.

• I became a soccer mom.  It was time for my son to try organized sports, and soccer was the thing that worked for our schedule.  I felt terribly awkward, trying to figure out how practices and games and uniforms and chit chat worked. And before I knew it, I had created the team banner (and was responsible for bringing it every week), kept the parents organized around snacks and made a few new friends. This sounds so tame. Which is why it so thoroughly freaked me out. And the depths of my freak out were deep. NEVER would I have envisioned myself doing this! And it was great. We lost nearly every game, the boys learned a lot, and had a good time. I'll be back again next year.
• I accepted my baldness. Yes. It's true. I have a disappearing follicle problem, courtesy my maternal genetics. I considered "row-gain" (ha) for women, but decided against it; primarily because once you stop using it, the hair loss just progresses anyway. I started taking biotin, fashioned a really clever comb-over hair style, and (mostly) stopped worrying out my stupid hair. I try to pretend that I'll be fine shaving it all off and getting wigs if it thins any more, but alas. I'm still just that little bit too vain to truly not care.
• I started opening up about my husband's anxiety and depression. I started dropping subtle hints to a few friends that I was struggling and badly. One or two picked up on it and chimed in with their own stories of marital hardship, disappointment, inexplicable hope, desolation, loneliness and resilience. I'm developing a probably very overdue view of marriage as something that only a lucky few really get in healthy, big, lasting doses. The rest of us work harder, suffer longer, receive lesser and feel lower than those fortunate ones. We smile and put on makeup and show up to ladder-climbing jobs anyway. But it's gritty and bitter and exhausting most days. Mental/emotional illness is simply nasty stuff.
• I decided it was time for a make over. I've spent the past three decades cultivating my intellect, character, and other insides. To the neglect of my outsides. Unfortunately.  And damn.  I decided to start working on that oh-so-coveted "executive presence" I keep hearing about. But this time, I started working from the outside in. Some makeup tutorials, trips to Macy's and many blog readings later, I've achieved some starting motion that will likely take me a couple more years to manifest. It's a start.
• I proudly wear granny panties. Although, my sister disagrees that my nomenclature is incorrect. While true granny panties go all they way up to just under-boob, mine go all the way up to my waist, which is a considerable distance with my bulbous gut and extra-long torso (courtesy paternal genetics, this time). God bless cotton and the right cut around the legs that doesn't chafe.  That's all I have to say about that. And also this: ladies - being comfortable is always underrated.

It's been a year of many internal changes.  I'm proud to call these decisions mine, although I perpetually feel underdeveloped, at least half-way clueless and victorious all at the same time.

Dumb Sprouting Plants; Why Not Sprouting Ideas?

So restless. And always have been. When will these things sprout?!

All my life, I've felt like I can think faster than most people. It's not that I'm always right, but I'm fast. And for all this, I can't figure out why I can't figure out what to write about.

In school, I was a fast test taker. My classmates always assumed I knew all the answers, but that wasn't true at all. I simply knew what I knew and what I didn't know. This allowed me to power though fill-in-the-blanks and essay questions with confidence and methodology. I had read somewhere that if you need to guess, your first guess is more likely to be true than your second or third guess. So I left my guesses alone and went back after grading to see how well my guesses had done.  It was always kind of fun, in an objective, forensic kind of way.

Another thing that helps me think quickly is being able to hold a significant number of variables and pieces together in my brain long enough for them to start showing me interrelationships. What is happening + how I know the world works + some hunches = some pretty insightful ideas, sometimes. I often conceive of ideas or information pieces as hued 3D shapes that start fitting together somehow. (You can see some evidence of this internal process if you watch my hands as I talk; they move and create shapes that are reflections of what I'm seeing in my head.  It's odd, and I've been teased for it by loving colleagues over the years.)

I'm also able to really break things down to their most basic components. And again, this is in the realm of thinking. It's like taking apart a toy and putting it back together again, back and forth and back and forth in succession.  The mental sensation is a little bit like going up and down a ladder.  Once I'm confident I know what each piece does, I focus on the ones I want and discard the others.

I can also block out distractions, ruthlessly in fact. When I'm working from home and my family happens to arrive before I'm done, they know that expression on my face that means over 90% of my brain CPU is occupied. They'll get me back when the idea or task is played through.

All these things, all the workings of my beloved brain, are not helping me focus, sift through and strike out on a content path which I hope to lead me to my eventual dream job of writing and speaking for a living. I can talk about:

• Being Japanese-American in an era where Japanese aren't really coming from Japan to the U.S. anymore and when three historic Japantowns remain in the entire U.S.  We're a dying breed.  
• Theology of the heartbroken. After my first husband went atheist and then gay, I could talk about how awkward and painful it is for one to inch and crawl back to a community and life of faith.
• Straight Spouse, etc. Because I've worked my hiney off to keep myself and my family strong after my divorce with first (now gay) husband, I get occasional reachings out from people who have questions for themselves or for loved ones about a possibly gay partner.

I'm sure I could talk about a lot of other things. 

What's with the little garden picture for this blog? Well - if it's so easy to cover seeds with some dirt, water them, protect them and watch them sprout into precious, tiny green things, where the heck are my great ideas to make the world a better place?  This is an intentionally imperfect comparison. It's just that I feel like there have been seeds lurking in the soil of my brain for too long, and nothing has sprouted yet.  When will these ideas start growing?!

A Ha'penny Will Do

I saw a new video on Facebook today from one of my favorite charities. It was hard to watch, and as I watched it, my cursor paused and hovered over the share button. Would this be too much for my friends to see? It’s about global cybersex trafficking affecting children, and the production team said it was one of the hardest stories they’ve told yet. The holidays have started, and we just went through a rough political upheaval in the U.S. I think people are exhausted by difficult things in social media land right now.  (dot, dot, dot)

Screw it. Of course I’ll share the video. And I’ll even comment about how hard it was to watch and how #givingtuesday is tomorrow and that people should consider donating to end cybersex trafficking. And here's why: I don’t think that justice-minded people are that much different than other people. They have the same feelings as everyone else. But what I do think is different is their unwavering commitment to take action and pay attention to hard things.

My friends working to heal the world tell me they, too, feel that overwhelming sense of helplessness, hopelessness when confronted with injustice and hardship. But they don’t stay there. WE don’t stay there. We shouldn’t and we can’t stay there. But we do travel through that dark valley of despair, just like everyone else. I believe we should have spirits and hearts strong enough to shift our focus from our work inbox and grocery shopping lists to global justice and poverty issues and back again. We should strive to feel the hurts of others and also tend to our own lives.

For the record, I don’t think it’s particularly fun, being a highly sensitive person. We notice everything, especially the odd, unhealthy, ugly and wrong things. But at this moment, I find myself celebrating my high sensitivity. It does add to my life in this one very important respect: it’s hard for me to feel callused to important issues where people’s lives and well-being are at stake. My sensitivity makes it impossible to ignore hunger, rape, racism, sexism, violence and disaster. And maybe it's even a gift I can share with others, to call them to attend to the needs of others every now and then.

So here’s to a little bitterness amongst the sweet, the pinch of sadness amidst the holidays. Cherish with me the ancient tradition of philanthropy, because “if you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do; if you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you.”  Be hardy and believe in the power of even the ha'penny.

#givingtuesday

Wandering

See that gal in the photo? I wish that was me.

I've been struggling with taking the next step in personal and professional life for some months now. While examining my life trajectory in detail is a regular occurrence for me, there are several aspects of this cycle of contemplation that make things much harder than in the past. Primarily, I don't have a clear gut feeling about what the most important aspect of my next move needs to be. That's a really weird sensation for me.

I'm a highly cerebral and intuitive person most times with tools and intellect to navigate complex moments. However, right now I find I lack the right questions to ask myself so that my path can become clear. Imagine a storybook bridge and a troll asking challenge questions, and then imagine being both the adventurer AND being the troll. Not so easy.

I'm finding Tara Sophia Mohr's Playing Big book and blog extremely helpful. It's so impactful, in fact, that I want to buy copies of this book for all the women in my life.  All of them - mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, friends, co-workers... It's helping me identify those sophisticated, subtle thoughts that are holding me back from my next breakthrough. Mohr's book is gracious in that she points out that brilliant woman are exceptionally brilliant at holding themselves back (not consciously, of course), therefore it may take a bit of work and digging to find those snags you're creating for yourself.

Fighting for the next upgrade to your soul, mind, heart and body is a worthy battle. Right now, I admit a profound confusion. One of my mentors told me, “it’s ok to wander.” I meditate on that, and it calms the anxiety that comes when one doesn’t have a certain, fixed point of reference. I recall the biblical imagery of important people wandering around in wilderness (uncultivated land) before they go on an important mission. That sounds about right. But what the record keepers simply gloss over by saying, “he wandered in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights...” is in fact, gritty, confusing and hungry work. Perhaps it's impossible to describe adequately, so they don't even try.

So maybe I am that gal in the picture, wandering in the wilderness and seeking new heights. Yeah. Maybe that is me after all.

Burgers for Breakfast

I wake up every morning, a little sad, poorly rested and restless of mind and soul. I search on my phone for news stories and personal updates that might engage me, might draw me out of the grayish mood I constantly find myself in. But it’s not very effective. I end up feeling bored, jealous of my so-called friends’ lives, and maybe slightly amused by some recent scientific breakthrough. If I’m lucky.

What I really want is something truly brilliant to greet me in the morning. Not the ticking of the clock to remind me it’s time to wake up my son. Not the trudging of my husband’s feet as he moves from coffee maker to shower to closet. Not the disobedient, tiny screen that I demand fulfilment from. I’m hungry. God, I’m hungry. I want something big, chunky, challenging, with real texture and flavor. 

Like a burger for breakfast.

I was at a small team-building meal one time, and it was breakfast at a local shop – something we decided to try because it was different. We had a higher likelihood of actually making it if we started our day with a meeting instead of breaking our day’s chaos to try to meet for lunch. And so we did, that once. I was looking at the menu, and everyone was ordering omelets and waffles, but I ordered a burger for breakfast. They all stopped and stared at me as I gave my order. “I thought you were joking,” one of my colleagues said.

No. I’m not.

I don’t joke about this type of thing. I feel unpleasantly drunk daily with useless information, meaningless activity, and self-pity that somehow I can’t shake this feeling of disappointment. Where is the substantive stuff? Where are the worthy content and ideas and conversations?

Well, whatever. I decided today to just write into the oblivion and see what happens.

This isn’t my first attempt to do what I’ve felt born to do. No way, Jose. This is like the fifth. But maybe I’m just bottoming out and in a “fuck it” enough kind of mood to do what I need to do. Write, you bitch. Write for your life.

Ok. But first, I need a burger for breakfast. And some fries, too, please.